The first five people who give me their name and (meatspace) mailing address will get something made by me. I'll even take suggestions, but I won't guarantee to take them. The catch (you just knew there would be one) is that you have to "pay it forward" as it were: If you accept you must make the same offer to those on your LJ friends list.

Now, most of the people I know don't do LJ, so I'll be cross posting this to facebook. Also I'm somewhat busy with classes and work and chorus and volleyball etc, ad nauseam, so it might take some time, but I'll get to it.

I heard about that and had the same reaction. If you were in the business of making an embedded application for a closed ecosystem and you knew there were exploitable vulnerabilities would you:

A) fix the exploitsB) Add a hugely complex system intended to use backchannels to prevent anyone from actually using the exploitable code...so long as you know exactly who they were, which backchannels and precisely the form their attack would take.

Let me think...Well, its not so important what the users may or may not want, but what do our customers want?

Well, the bells in St. Peter's basilica just tolled seven o'clock and I'm here listening to the fountains. It never occurred to me that sculpure would be so plentiful here. Nearly every building has some and the Vatican seems to have so much they don't really label them all. One of the first things in the Musei Vaticano is a very long hall of nothing but busts and other pieces from several millenia spent collecting them. If you only have a day I'd suggest a guided tour. You'll never get through it all otherwise.

I've never before been to a city that feels this permanent. There are buildings where the original doors are now below ground, not because they sank but because the city built up and left the older buildings behind. I have pictures that I'll post once I get a real computer.

Well, it's official: I'm going to Germany next week (I leave on Saturday morning) for work. Once I'm done there I'll be taking the train down to Rome, Florence and Venice and hanging out for a while. Anyone having any suggestions on places to see in these three places should chime in now. I'm also taking suggestions on unique places to stay in Venice and Florence.

I've never been out of North America, so it'll be an adventure. I have been requested by my family to take a camera, so I'm auditioning for a high quality fixed lens (not SLR) camera.

On another note, one of the premier sooth-sayers of our time has passed on. George Carlin was the jester of our time...speaking the truth while being funny enough to avoid censure. Check out his schtick on saving the planet

"the despot assures his subjects civil tranquility. Granted; but what do they gain, if the wars his ambition brings down upon them, his insatiable avidity, and the vexatious conduct of his ministers press harder on them than their own dissensions would have done?"